Illustration by A.J. Garces


Issue: Autumn 2002

Librettist’s Curtain Call

In the glittering world of opera, the heroic composer has always basked in the “bravos” (and bristled under the “boos”), while the humble librettist lurked in the shadowy wings. See if you can identify these lyric-scribblers without whom soaring arias, heart-rending recitatives and cathartic choruses would be mere melody.

1. A Jew who entered the priesthood, a Venetian who at times called Vienna, London and New York home, a libertine and freethinker, this itinerant wordsmith went from court poet under Emperor Joseph II to professor of Italian at Columbia University. He is best remembered, however, as the librettist of these three masterpieces by a single towering composer.

2. What Wrights are to aviation and Grimms are to fairy tales, this fraternal pair is to the American musical. The brothers collaborated as composer and librettist on a half-dozen Broadway shows before joining with a novelist/playwright whose popular 1925 fable they transformed into the undisputed great American opera.

3. Though primarily a poet, critic and novelist, this conservatory-educated librettist – who teamed with Verdi on several major works – tried his hand at composing too. If his politics were nationalistic (he fought with Garibaldi), his tastes decidedly were not. An outspoken admirer of Wagner and Beethoven, he published attacks on Italian music that provoked near-riots in Milan, dooming the 1868 debut of this, his operatic chef d’oeuvre.

4. An uncanny knack for wordplay and internal rhyming assured this New Yorker’s early triumph writing lyrics for Broadway’s mightiest composers. Once he put his verbal wizardry at the service of his own melodic ideas, he rapidly ascended the throne of American musical theater.

5. This Tuscan composer went through librettists like Hollywood directors go through screenwriters. No fewer than six scribes (yep, you gotta name them) are credited with putting words to his 1893 opera based on a popular novel by Abbé Prevost – which, incidentally, already had been musically staged nine years before by Massenet.

6. The plot of this opera – the sole masterpiece of a composer/librettist who produced 14 others – was rumored to spring from childhood memory. Its Neapolitan creator delighted in telling how his father, a local magistrate, had led the investigation into the stabbing death of an amorous, itinerant clown. The tale is a fabrication, however; and the opera’s likely source, a play by Catulle Mendès.

7. A bride driven to homicidal madness was the gothic theme (borrowed from Sir Walter Scott) of this Sicilian librettist’s first blockbuster collaboration with a master composer. In all, he produced 40 librettos – some hugely important, others hopelessly obscure.

8. Text and music were so interwoven in the aesthetics of this maestro that his librettos – mythic discourses invoking gods, dwarves, nymphs and mortals – were largely his own creations. “I believe in the Holy Spirit and the truth of the one, indivisible Art,” he wrote. “I believe that he who once has bathed in the sublime delights of this high Art, is consecrate to Her for ever.”

9. Characters from a popular cartoon strip were the inspiration behind this opera by a late romantic composer, whose carefully crafted libretto turned the comic figures of a sly fox and a bumbling forester into metaphysical archetypes.